While watching his fellow Yankees, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, hit homeruns, the incomparable Yogi Berra uttered the famous phrase:  “It’s déjà vu all over again!” 

In the now infamous and so-called Y2K “crisis” before the turn of the millennium on January 1, 2000, there were dire warnings for months in advance about mass computer and system shut-downs and countless disruptions of services all over the world.  It did not happen. 

Never before has an American president played the American people for fools such as Barack Obama has done this year with his apocalyptic warnings about what is going to happen tomorrow when the paltry “sequestration” spending cuts hit the federal government; a cut of little over 2% ($44 billion in actual outlays) out of a gargantuan fiscal year budget of over $3.5 trillion. 

The following are a few of the consequences, according to Obama and his liberal acolytes, that will occur if the scheduled cuts resulting from Obama’s own sequestration scheme  --  which he and his new Treasury Secretary Jack Lew hatched during the summer of 2011  --  go through tomorrow:

Canadian-born Ted Cruz, freshman Republican senator from Texas, can never be president of the United States.  On the other hand, he can be Senate Majority Leader. 

Senator Cruz seems to be taking the opposite path to Republican congressional leadership than has his fellow Hispanic, fellow Reaganite, and fellow Tea Party hero, Senator Marco Rubio, R-FL.  The latter senator sat on the back benches in the Senate chamber for most of his first two years in the Senate beginning on January 2011 until stepping into the spotlight.  And what a spotlight that has been, including giving the response last week to the president’s state of the union speech.

After Barack Obama rammed his $620 billion tax increase bill through Congress with hardly any Republican support, he is now advocating even more tax increases.  He, of course, will not use all of these gargantuan and economy-dragging tax increases to reduce the national debt nor his annual $1 trillion deficits   --  four such deficits so far and counting  --  but President Obama will use the additional tax revenue for his new spending programs. 

Indeed, President Obama was in North Carolina yesterday pushing for all kinds of new spending programs including $1 billion in federal aid for a network of 15 so-called “innovation institutes” which will foster “more efficient” business models.  This guy’s appetite for new government programs is insatiable.  You would have thought that the absolute failure of Obama’s $1 trillion stimulus program in 2009 would have taught him a lesson.  But listening to both his second inaugural speech and his state of the union speech on Tuesday shows that Obama absolutely is not chastened by the abject failure of his big government programs and he wants even more spending. 

After getting badly beat by Barack Obama in the first two major battles of 2013  --  passage of Obama’s $620 billion tax increase and his $60 billion “disaster relief” bill  --  the Republicans will gain a huge victory if they can muster up courage for the next battle coming to a head on March 1^st.  

The Republicans in Congress will not even have to pass any legislation to gain a victory on March 1^st.  That is because what Obama, and his fellow Democrats in Congress, thought was a clever little trap for Republicans  --  automatic cuts amounting to $1.2 trillion (half in defense spending cuts and half in domestic spending cuts spread over a 10 year period  --  will back-fire on Obama and Democrats if the Republicans allow the “sequester” cuts (which will also reduce the nearly $17 trillion federal debt by $1.2 trillion; no small feat) to become reality on March 1^st.

Barack Obama has put up the scariest group of 2^nd term nominees for his major cabinet posts since Franklin Roosevelt.  One of Obama’s extreme left-wing nominations includes his Secretary of State nominee, John Kerry, who many of us Vietnam War veterans believe is a traitor to those of us who served; most especially after his treasonous remarks disparaging war veterans during a wartime congressional hearing.

John Kerry said this during an anti-war congressional hearing on April 22, 1971 after he came back from Vietnam:  "They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

Since November’s election, which gave the Democrats the White House and the Senate and the Republicans the House of Representatives, there have been two major pieces of legislation on the floor of the House of Representatives; the first, a big spending and taxing bill, and the second, a big spending bailout bill.  Both times, the Republican-controlled House passed the bills with a very small number of Republicans voting for them. The Republican leaders could have, and should have, refused to bring these bills to the House floor for a vote. In the first of these two big spending bills, the Republican-controlled House also passed the biggest tax increase in some 20 years; Barack Obama’s whopping $620 BILLION tax increase legislation.

When the Tea Party and conservative movements gave control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans in 2010 with a huge pick-up of 63 new seats,   --  after the GOP had lost majority control in 2006 because of their prolific spending  --  and control of the House again with a large majority last November, there was no way conservatives believed that the Republican Party would repay them with two gargantuan back-to-back spending bills. 

After the Republicans and their congressional leaders lost the battle to stave off Barack Obama’s gigantic $620 billion tax increase bill  --  which actually also increased federal spending  --  and after John Boehner nearly lost his bid for reelection as Speaker of the House of Representatives on the first ballot last Thursday, the Republican leadership (most especially Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell,) should be walking on egg shells. 

The conservative base of the Republican Party is infuriated over the way Boehner and McConnell capitulated to Obama.  Other conservatives, at the very least, are disappointed in their leadership, such as it is, during the 112^th Congress. 

The Republican congressional leaders now have to win the three upcoming “fiscal cliff” battles during the next two months or Nancy Pelosi will resume her speakership of the House of Representatives on January 3, 2015:  the debt ceiling fight in late February or early March; the “sequestration” battle in March; and the “budget resolution” confrontation which must be settled by March 27^th.

Barack Obama reached the high point of his 2nd term just 19 days before he is sworn-in for his 2nd term.  The passage of Obama’s $620 billion tax increase bill will be the zenith of his remaining 4 years in office.

Obama will sign nothing of substance into law unless conservatives in the House of Representatives  --  who suffered a temporary setback on the first day of 2013  --  approve of that law. 

Indeed, Speaker John Boehner will not allow any major legislation that conservatives do not approve of to reach the House floor after the fiasco which occurred on the floor of the House of Representatives last night.  In violation of former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert’s rule of not bringing to the House floor any major legislation which does not have a majority of the Republican majority approving of the legislation, Boehner caused the Republicans in the House to suffer a major defeat. 

Boehner managed to get only 85 Republicans to vote for Obama’s $620 billion tax increase bill. An overwhelmingly majority of Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats (172 out of 188 voting Democrats) voted for Obama’s tax increase bill.  It was a stunning defeat for Boehner’s leadership style.   

Republicans should let Barack Obama jump off the “fiscal cliff” if he wants, but they can also do something productive for the American taxpayers.  That is why the American people gave them huge majorities in the House of Representatives in both the 112th Congress in 2010 and in the 113th Congress in last month’s election.  The Republicans in the House of Representatives should pass a permanent extension of President George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, leave town and have a Merry Christmas.

Newt Gingrich was quoted in a “NewsMax.TV” article on Saturday that he is almost afraid that agreement will be reached to avoid the country from going over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” because “the agreement will be ‘a really bad deal.’”  Remembering past deals such as the one President Ronald Reagan said was one of his worst decisions  --  i.e. Reagan said he would deliver $1 dollar in tax increases for every $3 of federal spending cuts offered by then-Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill  --  Speaker Gingrich said, “I don’t see any evidence that the president is prepared to deliver liberal Democrats in the Senate for any kind of spending cuts that matter.” 

This writer recently wrote a commentary entitled “Will GOP Leaders Become Bob Michelized?”  Unfortunately, during the past couple of weeks, the answer seems to be in the affirmative.  The headline referred to the former Republican House Minority Leader, Congressman Bob Michel, R-IL, who was perfectly content to position his party in the minority for his entire 14 years as GOP leader in the House of Representatives.  That is, until an upstart Republican Congressman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, warned Michel that he would challenge him for Republican leader during the next congressional leader elections.  Michel promptly announced that he would not run for reelection in 1994.

Meanwhile, because House Minority Whip Gingrich organized a massive and historic issues-oriented campaign during the election of 1994, including a “Contract with America,” he not only became leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, but Gingrich became Speaker of the House.